FOXBOROUGH, Mass. – You could cite any number of factors to figure out what happened here Sunday. A defense that just wouldn’t give in. A quarterback who seems immune to pressure. Big hits. Turnovers. Dropped passes. Clutch plays. The wind.

But one theme stands above the rest, one feeling, one sense about these Baltimore Ravens:

They’re a team that never lost faith in itself.

Even in the darkest, toughest times, the Ravens never stopped believing. Even after losing three games in a row in December, their season seemingly spiraling out of control, they never capitulated.

“After those three losses, I told everybody we were going to right the ship,” veteran receiver Anquan Boldin said after the Ravens’ 28-13 upset victory over the Patriots in the AFC championship game.

“We were going to win the division. This team is a team of faith. You name it, we’ve been through it.”

No one outside the Ravens’ locker room could have envisioned they’d make it to the Super Bowl after that third loss, a 34-17 clunker at home against Denver. Even unflappable quarterback Joe Flacco seemed somewhat rattled, saying afterward: “We’re a 9-5 football team, and it feels like we’re 0-14 right now.”

The Ravens were on the verge of splintering. “The sideline was trouble,” veteran safety Ed Reed said Sunday. “We never had that before.”

But instead of splintering, they rallied. The Ravens beat the defending champion New York Giants – who had gone through similar trials last season – the next week to clinch the AFC North.

“There’s something special in our locker room,” said linebacker Ray Lewis, whose retirement will have to wait another two weeks. “There’s just a certain love we have for each other.”

Having covered countless football games, I’ve never heard the word “love” spoken so often after one. Coach John Harbaugh said Boldin began the team prayer with that word. Love, Harbaugh said, “means so much more than what we think about sometimes. That’s what holds a team together. It was a team victory. It was about the team.”

Harbaugh used other words to describe his fourth-seeded team, which knocked off the AFC’s top two seeds on the road to reach Super Bowl XLVII. He mentioned faith, grace, toughness, heart, togetherness and work ethic.

“Everybody in our organization pulls the oar in the same way,” Harbaugh said. “And maybe in the end that’s enough.”

It takes good players, too, and Baltimore has those. One of them is Flacco, a player many in the media dismissed. But the Ravens – you guessed it – never lost faith in their quarterback. He has reciprocated by piecing together an impeccable playoff run.

After an uneven regular season, Flacco has thrown eight touchdown passes without an interception in three postseason games. He has six career playoff victories on the road, the most of any quarterback in history.

“He’s a great quarterback,” Boldin said. “I don’t know why people keep doubting him. The bigger the situation, the bigger he plays.”

In that sense, Flacco is similar to Eli Manning. Manning can be exasperatingly inconsistent. But when the Giants need him most – see Super Bowls XLII and XLVI – he invariably comes through. Even in last year’s AFC title-game loss, Flacco put the ball in Lee Evans’ hands for the go-ahead touchdown, only to watch it get knocked away.

The Ravens put the onus on Flacco in the second half Sunday, abandoning the run-first approach that netted only seven first-half points. Operating out of the shotgun, and without a huddle, Flacco threw three second-half touchdown passes. He sent Tom Brady home.

Flacco now shares that with Manning as well, and the Ravens-Giants comparisons don’t end there. Like New York a year ago, and Green Bay the year before that, Baltimore entered the playoffs as a long shot. But in the new NFL, it’s all about getting hot at the right time. The Ravens are this year’s hot team.

They’re underdogs against Jim Harbaugh’s 49ers in the HarBowl – or SuperBaugh, if you prefer – and that’s no surprise: San Francisco is the more talented team.

But sometimes the more talented team doesn’t win. As Lewis, a man of faith, said of Sunday’s payback victory: “God doesn’t make mistakes. There was no way he was going to bring us back here twice to feel the same feeling.”

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